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Add to SafariWhen comparing Yi vs nano, the Slant community recommends nano for most people. In the question“What are the best programming text editors?” nano is ranked 14th while Yi is ranked 46th. The most important reason people chose nano is:
Nano includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.
Specs
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Combines and improves upon the best text-editing features from your favorite editors
Yi has default configurations for Vim, Emacs, as well as CUA. It also makes several improvements that includes Sublime-like (multiple) cursors.
Pro More performant than Vim
Vim can be rather slow due the age of its code base. In particular, running large macros in Vim can be rather painful. Since Yi is being built from scratch it has been engineered for performance and with the benefit of hindsight.
Pro Extensible and modular editing features
As far as extensibility goes, Yi easily outstrips any other open-source text editor. Motions can be built from parser combinators, making them simultaneously flexible and modular - an open source hacker's dream.
Pro Plugins work together
Packages work together because they compile together.
Pro Easy to use
Nano includes only the bare minimum of functionality needed to edit documents making it very simple.
Pro Built-in cheat sheet for shortcuts
Shortcuts for common commands are shown at the bottom of the editor.
Pro Available on almost every Linux system as default
Similar to vi (vim), you can find nano on most Unix-like systems (even on Cygwin).
Pro Most of the languages supported
Syntax coloring is available for most of the programming language.
Pro Lightweight and bug free
Very stable editor that never hangs / leaks or crashes.
Cons
Con Very few plugins available
Even though Yi is a general purpose text editor similar to Vim and Emacs, almost all of the plugins that have been written for Yi so far focus on supporting Haskell as a programming environment.
Con No way to reuse your existing customizations and keybindings
If you have spent years crafting your .vimrc or .emacs, there's no way to reuse it in Yi. You have to start from scratch.
Con Requires Haskell to compile and configure
GHC + Haskell packages makes for a rather large installation, which is a big ask for a relatively obscure terminal editor.
Con Limited feature set
While nano is fine for writing blog posts or doing quick modifications, it's probably not suitable for programmers or someone who needs to work on an editor for an extensive period of time.
Con Uncommon keybindings
Nano uses a strange set of default keybindings, which is totally different than Vim, Emacs, VSCode and Sublime.
